


Can't Beat the Company

by Desiree_Harding



Series: Stolen Century (Desiree Style) [1]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: And Lup learning that other people exist and matter, Canon Compliant, Co-Workers to Friends to Lovers, Episode: e060-066 The Stolen Century Parts 1-7, F/M, Freeform, Getting Together, Getting to Know Each Other, Introspection, No Angst, You know all those good canon things, it's a good time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 14:35:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17143568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Desiree_Harding/pseuds/Desiree_Harding
Summary: "Lup wants to clamber into him and explore every nook and cranny, wants to draw out of him everything there is to know. She wants to know every iota of him, and all the things that led him here, and everything that ever took him and shaped him into the man he is today."A series of snapshots through the Stolen Century of Barry and Lup. In the same Universe asBury Bluejeans.





	Can't Beat the Company

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ad_asterism](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ad_asterism/gifts).



> Happy Candlenights! I hope you enjoy!

*~*~*~*~*

 

“Barry Bluejeans” is a pudgy, middle-aged human who looks like he thinks mayonnaise is spicy and when he shares with Lup and Taako during training that he’s lactose intolerant, Lup’s only thought is _of course_.

The whole crew is a pack of freaks, it seems, from the dwarf who hands out cosmic brownies on the first day of training (nice) to the twenty-year-old bright-eyed and bushy-tailed human who looks like he could be talked into fighting the literal wall with only minimal effort, to the shy, young human woman who literally doesn’t talk once during their first meeting at all except to say her name and what her job is, and it’s not even like she’s nervous to, and more like she doesn’t need to, and while Lup kind of _gets it_ it’s not like it isn’t fucking weird anyway. Hell, the captain’s the only one who seems even remotely normal.

But she and Taako are freaks, too, she guesses, so it’s not like it really matters anyway. It’s two months, two months that are going to rocket Lup and her brother to new heights (literally) of fame and notoriety beyond anything they’ve ever dreamed. They’re going to go down in literal _history_ and it’s going to be _rad as hell_.

Barry Bluejeans blushes and stutters his way through training, and beyond taking amusement from teasing him until he can’t speak, Lup doesn’t spare him a second thought after the sessions are done. Out of sight, out of mind, as far as she’s concerned.

It’s only two months.

 

*~*~*~*~*

 

Barry’s never been good at making friends. He knows he’s nice enough, but he’s never been gifted with the kind of social graces that allow conversation to flow easily from his lips. Doesn’t know how to deal with new acquaintances. He stumbles over his words and second guesses himself. It’s why he could never teach; he can know everything about a topic and never know how to get the words _out_.

But the twins? They move through the world with a kind of effortless grace that Barry could never even hope to achieve. They hardly seem real half the time. They’re aloof beyond belief; even their world being destroyed doesn’t seem to phase them. They laugh at anything and everything, but always at someone’s expense. Barry proves himself an easy target.

He can take it, of course. He’s met bullies before. A little jab here and there isn’t going to kill him, and Barry knows that no t everyone can be smart and talented and cool all at once. Sometimes some things just fall by the wayside. He more than makes up for it with his work, or at least he used to. Working on the _Starblaster_ is harder than working in his lab back on their home planet was. A two-month stock of equipment and a relatively tiny room means that many of the things he’d like to do are beyond his capability now.

And on a planet completely populated by animals with only the most rudimentary technology, well.

Barry might not be much of a science officer anymore.

He finds himself, after their first few weeks, with almost nothing to do.

Which is why he decides, against his better judgement, to study the animal language with the twins.

He would be lying to say he isn’t surprised at their choice of how to spend their time on the animal planet. Learning the language is a noble cause, especially if they’re stuck here for the indefinite future, but –

It’s just that Barry didn’t think the twins would _give enough of a shit_ to do the work.

Maybe he’s judged them too harshly, he thinks, but they never, throughout all of training, struck him as the kind of people who would want to go out day after day and try to make a connection with the residents of a foreign plane. The days are long, trying to even get any of the animals to stay in their vicinity for more than a few seconds, and to be honest, Barry goes out the first couple weeks expecting the twins to get bored any second and walk back to the ship, to pick up another pet project doing something that will go, well… faster.

But they don’t.

They never do, and it becomes routine, going out each day to look for animals who might tolerate them long enough for them to catch more than a few tiny snippets of the language. It’s… it’s _tedious_.

But research is Barry’s way. It’s all he knows how to do anymore, so while they struggle to make contact –

Well, Barry researches the twins.  

He doesn’t know a thing about them, really. And he knows that’s by design. You don’t go through months of training with someone and end up knowing exactly nothing substantial about them, especially training entirely focused on _creating bonds to run your bond-powered spaceship_ if it isn’t by design. Barry might be less than adept at getting to know people, but the twins aren’t exactly forthcoming about… anything.

He watches them, sees the way Taako gets Lup to cool down when she’s frustrated, and Lup’s frustration comes in quick bursts and is physicalized in a fraction of a second – a snap of her fingers, a flip of her hair, a too-sharp turn of the head, before it’s covered by the disinterested mask the twins share. Taako, by contrast, doesn’t get angry, but he sees _everything_. Even Barry, and he calls him out often on his expressions, and whether he’s paying attention, and what he’s paying attention too. He’s a hard task-master, and always expects perfection in their work. He gets fussy when things aren’t going right. He walks a thin line between complete irreverence and terrifying focus.

And he’s also the one, that after months of exploration, finds a small clearing in the midst of all the many trees and sits down in it, perfectly still and quiet, and refuses to move for the rest of the day, until Barry half thinks he’s just in meditation.

Lup rolls her eyes and gestures to Barry to leave him, and they spend the rest of the day futilely trying to catch up to a wild boar.

When they come back to the clearing that night, there’s a family of mongooses sitting at Taako’s feet, clearly talking about him. When they see Barry and Lup at the tree-line, their heads swivel back and forth between them and Taako, comparing, and they only run a short way away when Taako gets up to go back to the ship. Taako makes a strange grunting noise, and they cock their heads.

And Barry? Barry learns to maybe stop underestimating the twins so much.

They learn the language, over months, and Barry keeps learning the twins.

They’re like counterweights, he thinks. They rest of the crew jokes about not being able to tell them apart, but Barry thinks it can’t be based in any kind of truth. Lup and Taako are opposites. She’s all brute force, ready to pop off at any time, stitched together at her edges by Taako’s slow, balanced nature. And when Lup’s not around, even for a second, Taako shuts off, like water from a faucet. And he gets crueler, too, until she’s back in his sight.

It’s not simple like Barry thought it would be. They’re not just unfriendly, they’re _insular_. There’s a sense among them like there’s no reason to pay anything any mind that isn’t the other one, like everything in the whole world is extra. They’re curious, though, and whip-smart; they pick up the language, the customs of the animals much faster than Barry can, and they tease him mercilessly when he lags behind. It’s just that… it’s almost like, to them, nothing has any staying power.

He has to try to shake off the feeling that he’s a child watching the grownups talk whenever he’s around them. Which is ridiculous. They’re three times older than he is or something, but in terms of _maturity_ Barry should be older.

The twins, with their endlessly tangled personalities, make him wonder if that’s not false. If the whole idea of eleven “maturity” is just a myth made up by shorter-lived races to make themselves feel as though they’re relevant. Looking at Taako and Lup, Barry thinks that maybe he’s never known a single thing in all his life as well as he thought he did.

 

*~*~*~*~*

 

Lup finds Barry crying, and it occurs to her for the first time that they’re going to be with these people for a long time. And it occurs to her that she’s going to see Barry Bluejeans every day. And it occurs to her that he’s crying alone, in the dark, and she doesn’t know if he’s a solitary crier or if he’d maybe like some comfort, but she does know that she’s going to have to look him in the eyes tomorrow and know she saw him crying and not know why he was and not have done anything about it when she could have.

And it just doesn’t sit right with her.

 

*~*~*~*~*

 

Lup’s beautiful.

It’s a stupid thing to notice, after ten years, and it’s not like he didn’t know she was beautiful before, he did, everyone did, the twins are objectively beautiful, they’ve got the symmetrical faces and everything.

It’s just that now maybe that objective knowledge, resting in the back of his mind, is becoming impossible to ignore, because it asserts itself every single time he looks at her.

It’s very distracting.

Gods, he feels skeevy even thinking that thought, like the old IPRE professors who would say that the young female students in their classes had to dress a certain way because they’d be too _distracting_ if they –

He doesn’t even want to think about it.

But he can’t help it, because every time he looks at Lup it’s like a little alarm bell goes off in his head. _She’s beautiful_ it reminds him, except Barry doesn’t need reminding. Because he _knows_.

 _But it’s different than it was before, isn’t it?_ The voice in his head reminds him. And it is. Because it’s not just objective knowledge anymore. And it isn’t just objective beauty anymore. He’s noticing it in new ways, in her smile, or the way her brow furrows when she’s working alongside him in the lab. He’s noticing when her teeth are gritted from the effort of channeling spells more powerful than he’s ever seen, and when she laughs at something Merle said, her head falling back and her eyes nearly shut.

And the thing is, Barry doesn’t have time for a crush because the world is ending over and over and over again, and the other thing is he’s a forty-eight-year-old man (kind of) and she’s just at the beginning of her life. And they’re so different that even imaging doing anything about how beautiful he thinks Lup is _ludicrous_.

But still.

The noticing gets in the way of conversations and work and research missions, and it’s a long, hard lesson to learn to make the noticing go from an alarm bell to a quiet, unobtrusive word in the back of his mind where he can neatly file it away to be addressed at a later date.

It's even harder to do when he knows that later date is most certainly not coming.

 

*~*~*~*~*

 

The thing about Barry is that he’s a huge, ridiculous, unbelievable _nerd_.

Dude carries a fucking notebook on his person all the damn time, and it’s really fucking _stupid_ , because they have a damn chronicler, for gods’ sake, he doesn’t _need_ to take notes on shit, but he does anyway, because _the crew doesn’t go everywhere together, Lup_ and _I can’t ask that of Lucretia_ and Lup fucking _hates him_ , the _idiot_.

Maybe she’s just angry from the pining.

Even though she’s _not_ pining, not really, she’s just got a little crush on Barry, it’s not a big deal, Lup’s had lots of little crushes on people over the years, and it’s stupid that she’s hung up on Barry because it’s not even like – Lup’s got _worlds_ of options, literal worlds, and who cares if she can’t stomach sex the same way knowing that the people she’s fucking will die in less than a year and knowing they don’t know –

And _fuck Barry_ , honestly, with his stupid notebook and his stupid glasses, and his stupid fucking _kindness_ to everything and _everybody_ –

So Lup might be just a little bit in trouble.

It really _isn’t_ fair though, and she stews about it as she picks her way through the decrepit buildings of an old town on the planet they’ve found themselves stranded on this year.

They don’t know where all the people have gone, but they’re just – gone. Whole buildings stand empty and towns stand desolate. They’re in the middle of a desert at the moment, touched down by the only lake they can see for miles around a little way away from this town, and there’s nothing to do on the ship except stew and do science and bother Taako, which she was, but Taako is being an absolute _ass_ today, and Lup needed to clear her head.

Only partially because science means sitting in the lab with Barry only a few feet away from her, the lab is so tiny, and the proximity is driving her crazy, just because she saw him walking out into the common room this morning looking for his glasses even though they were on his head, and he’s a _huge terrible idiot nerd_.

_Fuck._

There’s not even so much good looting in the town, like on the robot cycle, because even if there’s not a sign of some war or something that killed all the people who used to live here, the buildings are old and they’ve been subjected to weather and time, and the technology here isn’t so advanced anyway.

So the best she could probably do is come back with a nice pretty trinket for her room, but something about that feels wrong, taking these people’s things after they’re all dead. It never felt wrong to steal when she was young, and it throws her off.

And in a horrible way it feels right, too, because if she doesn’t, it’s likely no one will remember them.

They’re only spending one night or so here anyway, since the light’s fallen by now and they failed to see it, and there’s no people and no animals, so Davenport says they have to take off tomorrow morning to start scanning the planet’s surface.

A whole year of scanning, Lup thinks, and they still might come up with nothing.

It’s going to be a long year.

Lup’s tired. She’s beaten down and discouraged, because this fucking mission just keeps going on and on and on, and she has to watch whole worlds fall apart and die almost every year, with all the people and things on them, and Taako might be good at apathy but Lup’s always been plagued by _empathy_ , and watching all that hurt takes its toll.

And then she hears a sound.

Music.

Lup’s had an ear for music ever since she was little, remembers sitting in with the pit of a circus she and Taako traveled with for a year or so, and letting the musicians laugh at her as she tried her hand on their secondhand, well-worn instruments, making all kinds of horrible noises with her untrained fingers.

This isn’t noise though, this is music, and Lup’s heart jumps for a moment, startled, before she remembers that it must be someone from the ship.

It’s a piano. She didn’t know anyone played.

She moves quietly through the old buildings, out into the street, and follows the plinking of the notes. Horrendously out of tune – the octaves are _terrible_ , but it’s something _nice_ and _real_ on this lonely world, and it pulls her right out of her angry and stressed and sad spiral and solidly into an all-consuming curiosity.

She wanders down the streets until she finds the building out of which the music spills. And it’s a little saloon, swinging doors and everything, and she tries her best not to creak the boards of the porch as she climbs up the few steps, and peers over the doors.

It’s Barry.

Sitting at an upright bar piano, the legs of the bench sitting atop spare boards to make it a little taller. The bar is a wreck, dust covering every surface, wood splitting and splintered, and the piano’s definitely seen better days.

But it doesn’t matter.

Because of everyone out there on the mission, on the _Starblaster_ , _Barry Bluejeans_ is a musician.

Lup smiles, immediately. Can’t help smiling at the sight. She can’t see his face, can only watch his back and his hands as they move across the keys, but she can see so much. He’s intent, like he is when he’s researching, his head bowed a little bit to watch his fingers. He’s careful, as always, running through passages of music from memory, pausing and starting again when his fingers hit a wrong note, or when a key sticks.

She almost calls out his name, thinking of how nice it would be to just _talk_ to him and let him pull the mad and the sad right out of her and make her smile.

But she doesn’t. She hesitates, the air sticking in her throat.

He’s so _Barry_ , sitting there like that, that a terrible wistfulness fills her up, and almost a sort of nostalgia, though Lup has no idea what on earth she’s nostalgic for.

He just looks so… relaxed.

Seeing Barry relaxed is a rare thing, more often spotted in the evening or the morning than any other time, when he’s become too tired to care about how people see him, and even then he only holds that state for a few seconds.

Say something to him, tease him and poke at him the way Lup’s perfected over the decades behind them, and he’ll blush and stammer. He does it now less than he used to, but he does it all the same.

And Lup makes sure he does it often. It’s one of her favorite reactions.

But she’d be a fool to say that she hasn’t noticed the way his shoulders tense up when they make fun of him. And the way he sometimes gets lost and doesn’t know how to answer. And the way that when she walks into the room he almost always changes the way he’s sitting, looks up from what he’s doing and looks almost _guilty_ , like he’s been caught in something he shouldn’t have been.

And it dawns on Lup, not for the first time, but maybe the strongest it ever has, that maybe they’re too hard on him.

Because _this_ Barry is different somehow than the Barry she knows, than the one she met at the IPRE. _This_ Barry can play piano, and _loves_ it, outwardly in the way that Barry always loves things, and it makes her wonder what else she didn’t know about him. What other passions does he have? Is he an artist, too? A writer? Did he used to have pets? Where did he learn this? Who was his teacher?

…Does he miss them now that their home plane has been destroyed?

It weighs heavy on her, because he’s not just the nerd she met in training, and he’s not just one of her home plane’s leading scientific minds, and he’s not just a toy for her and her brother to play with when things are feeling heavy, he’s a _person_. He’s multidimensional, and Lup wants to clamber into him and explore every nook and cranny, wants to draw out of him everything there is to know. She wants to know every iota of him, and all the things that led him here, and everything that ever took him and shaped him into the man he is today.

It’s an oppressive feeling.

But she doesn’t act. She just slides down onto the saloon’s covered porch, against the wall, and closes her eyes, and listens as the untuned notes pour out of the airy doorway, and imagines Barry’s gentle hands coaxing them out of the age-old instrument.

She sits for a long time and just listens to him play, and it’s nice. She sits until she feels the air cool, and all of the anger drains out of her body, even as she knows that she hasn’t _fixed_ anything, since here she is, listening to _Barry_ play, the dumb nerd who she came here to get away from in the first place.

She wonders when he even came out here in the first place, and why.

She almost wants to think it’s for the same reason that she did.

She’s just sits and listens, and lets her mind do what it will, and it’s almost like meditation, until she’s abruptly startled out of it by a voice next to her, an emphatic _shit!_ that cuts into her consciousness and makes her eyes fly wide open in surprise.

And when she looks, it’s Barry, looking at her, eyes wide, blush already on his cheeks and that awful tension creeping back into his shoulders.

Lup scrambles to her feet, because that won’t do, and she doesn’t want to have ruined his afternoon, and she knows this was something that she wasn’t supposed to be here for.

But then they’re looking at each other, and Lup doesn’t know what to say.

Lup _always_ knows what to say.

Barry looks so nervous now, and Lup feels awful, because this was for him, not for her, and she went and _ruined_ it because she was stupid enough to get caught.

“You sounded good,” she blurts before she can think any more about it, because she’s an idiot who does idiot things and way to go, Lup, that will sure fix everything, huh, telling Barry he sounded good playing the piano, yeah great job there you colossal _idiot_.

What the fuck is she even _doing_?

“Uh… thanks,” Barry says, blushing scarlet, and Lup decides that the best course of action is to pretend like this is no big deal. She puts on a practiced nonchalance, resting a hand on her hip and smiling, small and soft, at Barry.

“I didn’t know you played,” she says, “you never said anything.”

Barry shifts his weight, still looks a little shifty and uncomfortable, but he answers quick enough.

“Yeah, well,” he says, “it’s been a long time. Not a lot of uh… time to pick up hobbies out here I guess.” And Lup nods, because he’s right, and so wrong at the same time, because as it is, they seem to have all the time in the world, and why shouldn’t Barry pick up piano again if he wants to? It’s obvious he likes it.

She says as much, and he shrugs, looking almost a bit defeated. It only then occurs to her that maybe implying no escape from the Hunger until the end of time might not have been the best course of action here.

Why is talking to Barry so gods-damned _hard?_

“We should um, we should get back to the ship,” he says quietly, and it’s true: the sun is sinking low on the horizon and the crew will be wondering where they’ve gone if they don’t get back.

But Lup looks at Barry in the low light of the approaching dusk, and she sees what she saw before: a man far deeper and wider and _more_ than she ever thought of before, and that ache in her to get to know him fully and completely hasn’t ebbed even one bit.

Holy _fuck_ , Taako’s never going to let her live this down when he finds out.

“Well, Barold, allow me,” she says, offering her arm to him like she’s escorting him to some fancy event, and he kind of awkwardly chuckles, but loops his hand through her elbow, a little clammy, and Lup warms all over at the contact as she leads him down the steps off the porch and into the street.

The ship is nearly a twenty-minute walk away, and Lup thinks that’s plenty of time to strike up a real conversation.

 

*~*~*~*~*

 

“How old _are_ you?” Lup asks one days, looking at him curiously.

“Huh?” Barry looks up from his work and Lup smirks at him. Barry can feel the blush on his cheeks, tries his best to ignore it as his brain catches up to her question. “Oh.” He says, “umm… counting Starblaster years or no Starblaster years?”

“No Starblaster years,” Lup says quickly, “like… I don’t know, you just make jokes about your ‘old age’ and I was wondering, like…” she gestures to him, “how old is this body exactly?”

“Oh,” says Barry, blushing even harder, even though he _doesn’t know why,_ godsdamnit, it’s not like his age is something to be ashamed of or anything, and _fuck_ with Lucretia and Magnus, he’s like the third youngest person on the ship. Although, percentage-of-his-total-lifespan-wise, he might actually be the oldest –

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, Barry,” Lup says, with one of those kind smiles that she only pulls out when she’s talking to him, and maybe Lucretia. It makes Barry feel a bit like a frightened animal being coaxed to shelter. He’s not sure it’s an unfair comparison.

“No, it’s okay,” he says, looking back at the gadget in his hands, “I’m uh – I’m 48.”

Lup wrinkles up her nose, considering, “is that old for humans?”

Barry chuckles just a little, blushing some more.

“Depends who you ask,” he says, “Magnus and Lucretia might say so, being in their 20s.” Lup laughs a little at that too, and they’re quiet for a minute before Barry pipes up again, trying hard to make his voice lighter than it actually comes out.

“We’ve got – or shit, I mean we _had_ pretty good medicine on our world, so, you know, people tend to have pretty good longevity, but ninety years was still a pretty generous estimate. I’m – well, when I got chosen for the mission, I was already past half the average human lifespan, so.” He shrugs, suddenly uncomfortable under her shrewd gaze, “I guess everybody starts to feel a bit old when they realize they’ve got more years behind them than they have ahead of them.”

Lup makes a half-breathed laughing sound, a bit melancholy.

“Well, if our lives keep going they way they have been, that might not be true, old man,” she says teasingly.

Barry sighs, a bit heavy.

“I can’t imagine 28 more years of this,” he says, shaking his head.

Lup’s quiet for a good long while after that, just lounging in her chair and fiddling with some prototype Barry was working on last week. Lup does that, drops in and out of conversation. But after twenty years of knowing her, almost a third of Barry’s life so far, even a weird, non-aging twenty years, it no longer makes him uncomfortable. He goes back to tinkering at his bonds-based instrument, a small handheld device he’s trying to rig up to make it easier for them to assess a society’s friendliness or hostility from a distance. He’s getting tired of losing people at the beginning of cycles from stupid mistakes.

He works for a while, bent over the table as he casts and scribbles notes down, until –

“You humans have to live so _fast_ ,” Lup says, and Barry’s head snaps up to look at her.

She’s not looking at him, instead staring at an indistinct spot on the wall, her brow furrowed in consideration.

“What - what do you mean?” he says.

“You have to fuckin –” she gestures sort of indistinctly, “do everything so gods-damned _fast_. Like fucking mortality. You have to learn that shit in 48 years?” she shakes her head looking a bit quizzically at him, “when Taako and I were 48 we were – gods, we were practically _babies_.”

Barry gives a rueful little chuckle. “Just the way it goes I guess.”

But Lup scrunches up her nose, looks pained, and turns away from him so she’s just looking at the wall.

“I can’t believe you’re all _like that_ ,” she says, and she sounds endlessly regretful. “Magnus and Luce – if we were still on our homeworld, they’d be almost halfway through life too – and gods, you’d be retired, wouldn’t you?” she looks at him, and it’s evident she’s trying for lighthearted, but Barry can see her descending into someplace dark. “We’re stealing your retirement from you, my dude. No human ever fuckin – do y’all even hold jobs this long?”

“I might’ve,” he says with a shrug, but the answer isn’t good enough for her apparently, because she gets up, starts pacing the floor of the lab like a caged animal. “Lup,” he says, “everyone dies.”

She stops pacing, looks at him for a long moment, and he can see her visibly calm herself, taking in a few breaths, closing her eyes for just a moment longer than she would for a blink. Her ears, though, remain twisted low and back, and that’s how Barry can tell just how much this is bothering her.

“I guess you’re right,” she says with a shrug, looking over at him, meeting his eyes for just a minute before they dart away. “I think I’m going to go get dinner started. Bother Taako.”

It’s a bad segue, and a clumsy escape, clumsy in a way Lup usually isn’t.

“Okay,” Barry says, but she’s already out the door, letting it swing shut behind her and leaving him alone in the lab.

Barry knows she’s still upset, but he also knows Lup well enough to know he shouldn’t bring it up. Lup, for all her openness and smiles and sociability, still needs her space and her time to process things. It’s not like he can blame her. He spends enough time on his own to understand that.

Still, the lab is quieter without her, and Barry, as always, misses her company.

 

*~*~*~*~*

 

She used to see him around the Institute, she remembers, back in the old days, and it she always saw him alone.

A pudgy human man carrying cases of folders stacked three high in front of him through the quad, and they all toppled over, papers spilling out onto the grass, and he was scrambling to get them, and Lup and Taako, standing a ways away with their fake Institute “friends,” laughing and laughing.

He brought his research on the ship, a set of massive binders holding all the papers he’d ever written, and all the research they had on bonds, and on the bond engine, and on the Starblaster, and then planar research as well, papers upon papers of research.

It’s terribly disorganized, and impossibly extensive, and looking through it, Lup thinks that it’s no wonder he’s got such thick glasses these days, if he was reading this much back in his Institute years.

He’d had a reputation back then. Lup may not have cared about it, since he wasn’t an arcane expert like she and Taako were, but she knows others in the Institute did. He was known, even then, as one of the leading scientific minds on the planet. They said he’d completed his first major in a year and a half. Said by twenty-two he was making discoveries about the movements of the planes that had eluded scientists for Centuries. Said that at twenty-four they gave him his first teaching position, and that he didn’t teach now because he was a complete mess in front of a group, and the IPRE put him in a lab instead and told him to get to work.

He was so unassuming then, Lup thinks, and the years have changed him so much.

Or maybe he was always Barry, and Lup’s the one who finally learned how to appreciate him.

She knows in her heart of hearts it’s both.

She wishes, in a way, that she had known him. Known him when he hadn’t been scarred by tragedy and didn’t have the weight of the fate of all worlds on his shoulders. She wishes she had known him when he had time to play piano and had a cat and wrote letters to his mother in the country. She wishes, strangely, that she’d chosen to meet him then, for longer than the training sessions leading up to the mission, and outside of work, before his whole life fell to pieces before his eyes and hers did too.

She wonders if he ever noticed her, and what he thought about her if he did.

She feels so foolish. Guilty, almost, that she could go so long and _not_ know Barry. It frightens her to think that if there had been any other scientist chosen for the mission, she would never have known Barry at all, and she would never have cared, and Barry would have been taken by the Hunger and there might be nobody to miss him.

 It’s wildly unfair. Barry is _special_. The fact that he could ever have not been special to her seems so foreign to her now that it’s nearly unfathomable, and makes her feel a little bit sick.

But they had all under-estimated him then, hadn’t they? The IPRE mission was based largely on his work, thirty years of work that he had done at the institute, the literal majority of his life. But he hardly spoke at the press-conference before they left (no small part of that due to Lup, and she’s abstractly ashamed now), and when the pamphlets and posters had come out advertising the mission, it was Lup and Taako plastered all over them. Lup and Taako doing spells and Magnus’ muscles and Davenport’s imposing figure. Who outside of Barry’s

department ever cared about his work on that mission?

Lup thinks about their training, the way Barry would keep to himself, and she wonders if, after those strange sessions, he would go home to a lonely apartment without anyone to talk to about his life’s work, his _passion_. She can _see_ it: Barry cooking, or maybe ordering in since he’s really such a garbage cook, and sitting in silence. Just him and his cat. She wonders if he had a piano in his home.

The thing is, Lup never had friends before the mission. Lup spent her life being underestimated until the IPRE. But Lup had _Taako_. Whatever false friends she had were made obsolete by Taako, and no matter who ignored her, Taako never did. Lup _always_ had someone by her side, someone that she knew cared about her more than anything in the world. Lup had never once in her entire life spent a moment all alone.

She knows that Barry has.

“Lup?” Barry says, looking at her curiously, concern clear on his face. His hands are still on the petri dish he was messing with. “Are you okay?”

Lup flashes him a brilliant smile.

“Sorry,” she says, forcing a little laugh, “guess I zoned out for a second there.”

“We can take a break if you want?” Barry says, and Lup fucking _can’t stand him he’s so fucking nice_.

“Well I don’t know about you, my man,” she says, “but I think I just took one.” She gestures to the dish. “Come on. Explain to me what you’ve got in there and I can give you a second opinion.”

Barry laughs.

“Okay,” he says, rolling his chair over to her, and he starts talking.

If Lup revels in the proximity of his skin as they lean over the dish together, and later the microscope, she doesn’t mention it to Barry.

 

*~*~*~*~*

 

“Taako and I had a pretty shit childhood,” Lup says, poking at the fire crackling fire before them. The planet runs cold this year, and the wilds are extensive between their cities. Barry, for all his extra padding, can’t get warm, and neither can Lup and they’ve huddled up in front of a camp fire in the small camp they’ve made up.

Barry is tired. His recorded state is used to mostly stationary days in the lab, not cross-country hikes to try to track down the light. They’ve been walking for days, and it’s not the worst it’s ever been, but it’s not easy for him either. They’ve been out there for over a week now, in close proximity, sleeping in the same tent, huddling up night after night to chase away the cold.

It’s okay. They’re friends. Barry can handle it; he _is_ handling it. But the contact of their shoulders under layers of clothes and cloak still lights up his skin and makes him hyper-aware.

Lup isn’t saying anything, and it occurs to Barry that she’s probably waiting for some kind of acknowledgement that he’s listening.

 _Yeah_ , he’s going to say, that’s good and non-committal, but instead –

“I know.” Oh gods why did he say that, what is he playing at –

Lup looks at him for a long moment, and Barry doesn’t look back, just keeps staring at the fire, because he doesn’t want to see her get offended, and the – the _disgust_ in her face when she realizes that Barry’s been stalking her in close proximity for the last 38 _years_ and she pulls away from him –

“Huh. Yeah I guess you would.”

_What?_

There’s _humor_ in Lup’s voice and when Barry looks over, her mouth is set in a hard line of a half-smile, like she does when she’s trying to keep her spirit up but something is still bothering her. Barry feels like he has to explain himself.

“You two – you make jokes all the time, you know? And you’re always – you’re really good at the whole,” he gestures around him indistinctly at their little camp set-up, “you know, the whole survival thing. And you uh, you know how to uh, make the food stretch when we get to a plane without a lot of it. I mean, I wasn’t trying to – I just sort of thought that you might’ve… had some… rough times?”

Maybe he should just let himself freeze to death this cycle so he’ll _shut the fuck up_.

But Lup just chuckles.

“You’re really something, Barry,” she says, and he dares to glance over and the smile is just a little more genuine now. She reaches for another couple branches, throws them on the fire, poking it until she seems satisfied.

“We did have some rough years,” she says, then snorts, “if a hundred or so counts as ‘some’,” she does air quotes and all. “Really things weren’t alright until we ended up at the IPRE.”

Barry’s just listens as she talks.

“We spent a lot of time on our own, you know? And we had to constantly fend for ourselves, and we almost died like a fuckin’ million times. It was just…” she trails off, brow furrowed, and Barry thinks that maybe even she doesn’t know what she’s trying to say.

“Do you ever wonder how you got here, Barry?” she asks him suddenly.

“I mean, sometimes I freak the fuck out about it if that’s what you’re asking,” he says honestly. “Fuck, we didn’t even know if there were other planes to _go to_ when I was back working in the lab. Now I’ve been to almost forty.”

“Yeah,” Lup says, but Barry has a feeling that’s not what she was talking about. She smirks though, and nudges him gently in the side. “If we keep this up, you might be the oldest human from our plane ever. You might even get to elf age.”

“Well, I guess – I guess there could be worse things,” he says, absently. He’s getting tired, should probably get to sleep soon. Lup will insist on staying on watch outside the tent for danger, and Barry wishes she wouldn’t. She’s leaning against his shoulder and Barry wishes she would just come and lay down with him and they wouldn’t have to be apart anymore.

He loves Lup more than is reasonable. More than is logical. He thinks he might die from this.

“Worse than watching worlds fall apart and being responsible for the possible destruction of, oh at this point, billions of souls?”

Barry worries about her. It’s a strange feeling, because Lup is the most capable person he knows. She’s powerful. Sometimes she even seems invincible. But worry has always been Barry’s way. He used to bite his fingernails down to nubs when he was a kid, and his mother would scold him.

No, Barry worries about Lup because she says things like that.

It’s her empathy that gets her, he thinks. Maybe it’s ironic that they share the same fatal flaw. Both of their judgement clouded by emotion, both of them learning to feel too deeply and too quickly for people they’ve never met. He knows it’s good, in the end. Without Lup they might be plundering worlds for magical artifacts to steal before the Hunger could get them, with no concern for the plane’s residents. But it also means that with every dying plane, the universe weighs a little heavier on Lup’s shoulders. On his too.

He wishes he could take it off, take it all away. He wishes that she wasn’t bent by tragedy like this, that every year of their lives didn’t have this terrible twist ending, even the good ones. He wants to tell her that it’s not her fault, that it’s just how things happened to go, that whether Lup was there or not the Hunger would have come, and they’re doing more good now than if they weren’t here at all.

But it’s dark, and it’s late, and Barry’s looking at her, sleepy against his shoulder, and he thinks that assigning the watch can wait a few minutes more, and that fighting the deep existential dread on their backs can wait a little longer too. And Lup winds her arm through his, so linking them together, and Barry decides to be brave.

“Can’t beat the company,” he says.

 

*~*~*~*~*

 

It occurs to Lup that she doesn’t know Barry’s real name.

Maybe Barry is his real name, but Bluejeans is definitely just something she and Taako made up. And it occurs to her that she’s never heard Barry say what his actual last name is, and it also occurs to her that she’s in love with this man, and that maybe she should know what his _gods-damned name is_.

This, of course, all comes over her while she’s sitting across from Barry at a dingy little restaurant on another plane, something like the…. 40th? Yes, 40th, now. Their dinners together have become somewhat commonplace these days, Lup inviting Barry to venture off of the ship and out of the lab when he can, tempting him with good food and (she hopes) good conversation. It comes to her while she’s looking at Barry laughing at some joke she cracked, his graying hair looking lovely under the neon lights of the sign on the wall, and he’s spilled something on his shirt from the meal, some sauce from the spicy curry-like thing in their bowls, but he’s laughing and he’s beautiful and Lup realizes that there’s still more she doesn’t know about him, a beautiful, fascinating revelation every time it comes to her.

“What’s your name?” she asks, apropos of nothing, and she watches as Barry stops laughing and looks at her like she’s losing her mind.

“What?”

“Barry Bluejeans isn’t your real name,” she says, “I know because I’m the one who came up with it. So what is it?” She realizes how pushy the words sound as they come out of her mouth and she quickly tries to cover herself, not wanting to be that pushy Lup who treats Barry like an object anymore. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she says quickly, “I was just curious.”

“No, uh, it’s fine,” Barry says, but looking a little nervous all the same, and he takes a long drink of the deep red wine he’d picked out for them. It’s nothing like what they’d have on their home world, too sweet and sour and not bitter at all, and Lup likes it. Barry takes his long sip, _for courage_ , Lup thinks and then she’s surprised at herself for thinking that, and then he speaks.

“Don’t laugh,” he says, and true to form Lup giggles a little bit just at that sentence out of his mouth.

“Is it that bad?” she says, chuckling.

“I don’t know how bad it is,” he says, “but you uh - you have to promise not to laugh.”

“I said you didn’t have to tell,” Lup says, good-natured, reaching for her glass. “I don’t have to promise you anything.” And she thinks that even ten years ago she wouldn’t have gone for a risky jab like that, but oh how things have changed.

“Fair enough,” Barry laughs, and then he pauses, purses his lips, takes another sip of wine. He holds the glass by the stem, and Lup loves the lines of his hands. He swallows, and she loves the line of his throat. And then he looks at her, and his eyes melt her to nothing.

“It’s uh, it’s Sildar. Hallwinter,” he says, and Lup doesn’t laugh.

“Sildar,” she repeats, almost reverently, and she pretends that she doesn’t see the way his eyes darken a little and his sharp intake of breath at hearing her say it. “Sildar,” she says again, and it’s strange because it doesn’t fit him. “It’s like something out of a story,” she says, low and wondering.

“It is a bit old-fashioned,” he says, looking a bit sheepish at it, “but it’s a, it’s a family name I guess.”

“I like it,” she says. “It sounds noble.”

“Thanks,” He looks a bit awkward now, only just a shade more awkward than he always does, but another thought bubbles up to the front of Lup’s mind, and she can’t help but voice it.

“Does it bother you that we call you Barry Bluejeans?” she asks, and maybe she’s tipsy or something, maybe this wine is stronger than she thought, because her tongue isn’t usually this loose, and her brain feels so focused but slippery at the same time, and she can’t think about anything but _Barry_ , but _Sildar_ , she’s drunk on him, surely, alcohol or no.

“What?” he asks, like he didn’t expect the question, and Lup thinks why would he, when they’ve shown such disregard for him in the past. So much of Barry’s life on the Starblaster has happened without his permission, and Lup thinks that even though that’s changing, it didn’t change soon enough. Probably because it never should have been at all.

“Do you mind? I mean Taako and I just made up a name for you, and you know we were –” she chokes on the words, looking at him now. “We were making fun of you,” she whispers, and thinks that Barry won’t hear her in the noise of the restaurant around them.

“I - I know you were making fun of me,” he says, looking at her just as intense as she is at him, and it’s electric, “but I don’t, I mean it’s not like I…mind. Anymore.”

“Really?” she has to be drunk. She’s never this sincere.

“Really,” he says, like it’s nothing. “I know you and Taako goofed around in the beginning, and I didn’t always – I wasn’t great at socializing? I knew that. But I also, you know, knew when it was at my expense.” He takes another sip of wine, finishing his glass off. He looks away, contemplative, and Lup hangs on his every word.

“I mean, for a while, it was weird,” he says, quiet. “It wasn’t… it did feel like I wasn’t being… I don’t know, taken seriously I guess?” Lup thinks her heart’s about to break, but then Barry looks at her and smiles.

“But then I realized that that’s just how you and Taako work,” he says, “and I realized that you actually gave a shit about all of us, and about me.” He’s blushing again, and Lup wants to drain it away, drain the embarrassment out of him. What should he ever be embarrassed about? He’s _Barry_.

“I don’t mind” he says, “it’s not like - I mean you all know me as Barry Bluejeans now and I –” he pauses, for a half second, his eyes far away and searching, “I think that maybe – you know, Sildar was someone that belongs to our homeworld.” His smile is small, but it’s warm, and Lup really, really likes him.

“Does that make any sense?” he says, that little smile decorating his face and it suddenly occurs to Lup for the thousandth time just how much he’s changed, because it isn’t a question coming from a place of insecurity. Barry _knows_ it makes sense, or at least it makes sense to him. It’s Lup’s job to catch up.

Gods, she’s never had to catch up to anybody before Barry.

“You’re just saying you like your dumb nickname, you nerd,” she teases affectionately, and watches him laugh again with what she’s sure must be stars in her eyes. He looks so good. Lup wants to kiss him. She won’t, because there’s still something there – she doesn’t know what. Barry’s perfect, and Lup has never once asked a guy out who didn’t jump at the chance, but still. There’s something.

Lup won’t kiss him tonight.

But oh, she wants to.

 

*~*~*~*~*

 

Barry hates running.

He remembers once upon a time he used to be a good runner, back when he was just a kid, a skinny thing, running across the wide fields of their homeworld that surrounded his home, because he had to make his brain quiet itself somehow.

He’s not young anymore, and his legs and lungs burn with the effort.

But he’d do anything at all to feel Lup’s hand in his hand, and he’d do anything now to get somewhere quiet and alone with her, because the smile on Lup’s face after the performance was exhilarated and exhilarating, and Barry’s in love with her and can’t hold it in anymore.

So they run, up the path from the mountainside amphitheater, and through the Conservatory’s campus, abandoned after the performance, and back to, strangely enough, the Starblaster, and they’re barely inside when Lup abruptly changes course, whirling around, and she grabs Barry by the collar and slams him against the wall and kisses him.

It’s… it’s everything. Barry kisses her back, and he winds his arms around her, pulling her close, and he’s so, _so_ –

“I thought you said you wanted to talk,” he gasps when she finally pulls away. And Lup laughs.

“Shut up, you idiot.”

And she kisses him again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Leave a like and a comment if you enjoyed my 8,000 words of introspective Blupjeans, and if you want more introspective taz, hop over and read my others!  
> Happy Candlenights to all!! May your days be merry and bright!


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